A man is swimming the Pacific to raise awareness about plastic pollution

His long swim from Japan to the US started on World Environment Day

It is a long way from Tokyo to Los Angeles. Five and a half thousand miles (8,850km) to be precise. Flights between the two cities typically take upwards of 11 hours. And earlier today, on World Environment Day, French-born Benoît Lecomte set off on this journey. The only unusual bit is that he is swimming the distance.

Long-distance swimmer Benoit Lecomte

Called, rather unimaginatively, The Longest Swim, the expedition will see Lecomte swim 30 miles over eight hours every day for 180 days as he makes his way through tidal currents, and shark- and plastic waste-infested waters on his way to the Californian coast. The 51-year-old is not doing this for his health though. He is doing this for the health of our oceans. The goal of the whole exercise is to raise awareness about the problem plastic pollution poses in our oceans and risk it poses to our world.

Lecomte and the six colleagues trailing him in the support sailing yacht Discoverer, will collect and study samples with assistance from NASA, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the University of Texas at Austin and nine other educational and research institutes. They will study plastic debris, radiation in the water from the Fukushima disaster, giant phytoplankton and how they impact marine life. All this data will be used to construct a rich and complex picture of life in the Pacific Ocean. This is the first time such a research product is being conducted by members of the general public.

The Longest Swim…

The Frenchman will be kitted out in a wetsuit, snorkel, a heart monitor, a shark repellent bracelet and a little contraption that tracks radioactivity levels in the water. Aside from the support sailboat, the team will also include a tugboat that will sail along handing Lecomte food (he will be burning around 8,000 calories every day) and any medical assistance he might need during his swim. The tugboat is fitted with a GPS tracker so, at the end of the day, when Lecomte comes on board, they know exactly where he stopped swimming so he can start off again at the same spot the next day.

Through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

During the journey, Lecomte will make his way through the infamous Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Located halfway between the coast of California and the archipelago of Hawaii, it is estimated this bit of the ocean, nearly three times the size of France, contains about 8m metric tons of plastic floating on the surface. The plastic here is a result of garbage we dumped into our rivers that has over time, owing to currents, accumulated here and in four other “offshore plastic accumulation zones” in oceans around the world.

This is the second time Lacomte has attempted something like this. In 1998, he swam the Atlantic Ocean in 73 days to raise awareness about cancer research after his father died from the illness. Then, he had emphatically said “Never again”. Now he is back in the water for another kind of illness–one that will affect every single one of us.